After some needed R&R as the holiday season gets underway, it’s time to resume blogging in a more regular way. Thank you for your patience! The relative lull on the chess calendar provides a good moment to do some catching up and build some momentum, so we’ll start doing that now.
Let’s begin with some news you can use: Stockfish, the best chess engine on the planet (except for Alpha Zero, but that’s a matter of a mega-corporation’s hardware) has released a new version that is significantly stronger (up to 50 points stronger in Fischer Random) than its predecessor, thanks to the latest neural net tweaks. In concrete terms, this means that while the previous version would beat Magnus Carlsen and every other human 100.000% of the time, the current version will…beat Magnus Carlsen and every other human 100.000% of the time. But now our analysis, as we try to beat each other, will be that much stronger. (Luckily, both you and your opponents will be unable to memorize all of that analysis, or to play perfectly once what we’ve remembered comes to an end. Thankfully, chess goes on.)
The other good news is that Stockfish’s lawsuit against ChessBase (which used Stockfish’s open source code, slightly modified it, and then sold the resulting program as if it was fundamentally their own creation) resulted in a settlement that is essentially a complete victory for Stockfish. Good.
All the links, including the download link for the latest and greatest version, are here - see the December 4 entry for details and links to the specific legal topics.